Syria’s allies are stretched by widening war

The Wall Street Journal reports: The Lebanese movement Hezbollah, facing a heavy strain on its resources, is recruiting more fighters in Syria and bringing in fresh but inexperienced forces from Lebanon to shore up Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

In the past year, Hezbollah’s battle-tested fighters helped Syrian forces retake territory around the capital Damascus and other key cities such as Homs and Aleppo, paving the way for Mr. Assad to win a third, seven-year term as president in elections last month.

But Hezbollah members and people involved in the group’s operations in Syria said the militant group is now stretched thin by two conflicts involving its Shiite allies that threaten to erode, if not undo, its successes in Syria.

A Sunni rebellion against the Shiite-dominated government in neighboring Iraq is drawing home Iraqi Shiites who have been fighting alongside Hezbollah in Syria, according to pro-government militiamen in Syria.

On Monday, Islamic State, the extremist group leading the fresh insurgency in Iraq, captured more territory in Syria by routing rival rebel factions from the city of Deir-Ezzour, according to Syrian activists and a spokesman for the rebel umbrella group known as the Free Syrian Army. The city is the seat of the resource-rich province of Deir-Ezzour bordering Iraq and the conquest gave Islamic State control of nearly 80% of the province. [Continue reading…]

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Todd Miller: Bill of Rights rollback in the U.S. borderlands

You’re not in the United States. Oh sure, look around at the fog lifting over the New England countryside or the diamond deserts of Arizona, but this land isn’t your land, not anymore. It’s a place controlled by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and your constitutional rights do not apply on their territory. CBP can, and does, detain Americans, search them without warrant, and physically mistreat them in what has become, for our 9/11 sins, a Post-Constitutional legal purgatory. You are neither outside their grasp in a foreign land, nor protected from them by being inside America.

The concept that the Constitution does not apply at America’s borders is not new, particularly in relation to Fourth Amendment protections against search and seizure. (In this context, “seizure” often takes the form of detention, as well as the more traditional concept of taking physical possessions away.) Once upon a time, the idea was that the United States should be able to protect itself by examining people entering the country. Thus, routine border seizures and searches without warrants are constitutionally “reasonable.” Fair enough. The basic rules, in fact, go back to 1789.

But the fairness of the old rules no longer applies, particularly in the face of a constantly metastasizing CBP, anxious to expand its place in the already expansive Homeland Security ecosystem. On its website, CBP boasts of making 1,100 arrests a day as, in its own words, the “guardians” of America. Do the math: that’s 401,500 a year, and those arrests are not limited to dangerous foreigners. Americans who hold certain beliefs and affiliations are swept up as well, whether they are prominent journalists, activists, or simply (as in today’s piece) angry spouses of men beaten nearly to death by CBP agents. The agency now insists that its jurisdiction does not end at the physical border, the line on the map that separates say the United States from Mexico, but extends 100 miles inland.

Building on his successful new book, Border Patrol Nation: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Homeland Security, TomDispatch regular Todd Miller brings us more examples of CBP lawlessness and brutality, while asking crucial questions about its larger meaning to our nation. Get ready to be scared. If you live near the border, cross the border after a trip abroad, or attract the attention of roving CBP patrols in New England or Arizona within 100 miles of the line, this land belongs not to you and me, but in Post-Constitutional America, increasingly to our so-called guardians. Peter Van Buren

Border wars in the homeland
“Stop stepping on the pictures”
By Todd Miller

Shena Gutierrez was already cuffed and in an inspection room in Nogales, Arizona, when the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agent grabbed her purse, opened it, and dumped its contents onto the floor right in front of her. There couldn’t be a sharper image of the Bill of Rights rollback we are experiencing in the U.S. borderlands in the post-9/11 era.

Tumbling out of that purse came Gutierrez’s life: photos of her kids, business cards, credit cards, and other papers, all now open to the official scrutiny of the Department of Homeland Security. There were also photographs of her husband, Jose Gutierrez Guzman, whom CBP agents beat so badly in 2011 that he suffered permanent brain damage. The supervisory agent, whose name badge on his blue uniform read “Gomez,” now began to trample on her life, quite literally, with his black boots.

“Please stop stepping on the pictures,” Shena asked him.

A U.S. citizen, unlike her husband, she had been returning from a 48-hour vigil against Border Patrol violence in Mexico and was wearing a shirt that said “Stop Border Patrol Brutality” when she was aggressively questioned and cuffed at the CBP’s “port of entry” in Nogales on that hot day in May.  She had no doubt that Gomez was stepping all over the contents of her purse in response to her shirt, the evidence of her activism.

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Monsanto’s herbicide linked to fatal kidney disease epidemic

Jeff Ritterman, M.D. writes: For years, scientists have been trying to unravel the mystery of a chronic kidney disease epidemic that has hit Central America, India and Sri Lanka. The disease occurs in poor peasant farmers who do hard physical work in hot climes. In each instance, the farmers have been exposed to herbicides and to heavy metals. The disease is known as CKDu, for Chronic Kidney Disease of unknown etiology. The “u” differentiates this illness from other chronic kidney diseases where the cause is known. Very few Western medical practitioners are even aware of CKDu, despite the terrible toll it has taken on poor farmers from El Salvador to South Asia.

Dr. Catharina Wesseling, the regional director for the Program on Work and Health (SALTRA) in Central America, which pioneered the initial studies of the region’s unsolved outbreak, put it this way, “Nephrologists and public health professionals from wealthy countries are mostly either unfamiliar with the problem or skeptical whether it even exists.”

Dr. Wesseling was being diplomatic. At a 2011 health summit in Mexico City, the United States beat back a proposal by Central American nations that would have listed CKDu as a top priority for the Americas.

David McQueen, a US delegate from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who has since retired from the agency, explained the US position.

“The idea was to keep the focus on the key big risk factors that we could control and the major causes of death: heart disease, cancer and diabetes. And we felt, the position we were taking, that CKD was included.”

The United States was wrong. The delegates from Central America were correct. CKDu is a new form of illness. This kidney ailment does not stem from diabetes, hypertension or other diet-related risk factors. Unlike the kidney disease found in diabetes or hypertension, the kidney tubules are a major site of injury in CKDu, suggesting a toxic etiology. [Continue reading…]

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Thousands of families flee north Gaza

Al Jazeera reports: After more than 12 hours of work, the bulldozers were still clearing what was once the al-Batsh family’s three-story house in eastern Gaza City, reduced to rubble after Israeli warplanes hit it with two bombs.

The air strike took place just before midnight on Saturday, the fifth day of Israel’s aerial assault on Gaza. Eighteen people from the same extended family were killed, the highest death toll in a single attack so far in the offensive, which has claimed more than 165 Palestinian lives to date.

The bombing in the Shaaf neighbourhood was said to be targeting the local police commander, Tayseer al-Batsh, who survived the strike with serious injuries. Shortly after the house was destroyed, Israel also struck several police and security posts in Gaza City.

“There was no reason to hit the house,” said Mohammed al-Batsh, a lawyer in his 30s, as dozens of people gathered to inspect the home and examine the severe damage to nearby houses.

He added that the airstrike killed Majed al-Batsh, the police commander’s cousin, and 10 members of his family – parents, children, daughters-in-laws and grandchildren. “They posed no threat to Israel. They were not firing rockets. They were civilians, children and women.” [Continue reading…]

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Hamas lays out truce terms, says deal not close

AFP reports: The Palestinian Hamas movement said Monday that it would not end hostilities with Israel without concessions by the Jewish state and that no serious efforts towards a truce had been made.

“Talk of a ceasefire requires real and serious efforts, which we haven’t seen so far,” Hamas legislative member Mushir al-Masri told AFP in Gaza City.

Masri said Hamas would only negotiate on the basis of a set of concessions it wants to see Israel agree to.

Those include the lifting of Israel’s blockade on the Gaza Strip, the opening of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt and the release of Palestinian prisoners Israel has rearrested after freeing them in exchange for kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

“Any ceasefire must be based on the conditions we have outlined, nothing less than that will be accepted,” Masri said. [Continue reading…]

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For Netanyahu, Gaza proves why Palestinians cannot be allowed to govern themselves

In a news conference held on Friday in which Benjamin Netanyahu spoke only in Hebrew, the Israeli prime minister spelled out why he believes a two-state solution is impossible:

The priority right now, Netanyahu stressed, was to “take care of Hamas.” But the wider lesson of the current escalation was that Israel had to ensure that “we don’t get another Gaza in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank].” Amid the current conflict, he elaborated, “I think the Israeli people understand now what I always say: that there cannot be a situation, under any agreement, in which we relinquish security control of the territory west of the River Jordan.”

Not relinquishing security control west of the Jordan, it should be emphasized, means not giving a Palestinian entity full sovereignty there. It means not acceding to Mahmoud Abbas’s demands, to Barack Obama’s demands, to the international community’s demands. This is not merely demanding a demilitarized Palestine; it is insisting upon ongoing Israeli security oversight inside and at the borders of the West Bank. That sentence, quite simply, spells the end to the notion of Netanyahu consenting to the establishment of a Palestinian state. A less-than-sovereign entity? Maybe, though this will never satisfy the Palestinians or the international community. A fully sovereign Palestine? Out of the question.

He wasn’t saying that he doesn’t support a two-state solution. He was saying that it’s impossible. This was not a new, dramatic change of stance by the prime minister. It was a new, dramatic exposition of his long-held stance. [Continue reading…]

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Islamic State in Syria, back with a vengeance

Hassan Hassan writes: The Islamic State’s stunning advances in Syria over the past month defy basic military instincts. Consider, for example, the group’s remarkable turn of fortunes in the eastern province of Deir ez-Zor in recent months, where ISIS—as the group was formerly known—all but vanished in February after local rebels joined forces to batter the remaining ISIS strongholds in the province. Rebel groups elsewhere had likewise planned in May to push against ISIS’s last fortress in Raqqa, another eastern province, so as to drive the group out of the country entirely. Yet ISIS, or the Islamic State as it is now called, is now back with a vengeance.

The Islamic State is now on the offensive in much of Syria, especially in the east and north. If the group manages to retake the ground it had lost after most of the rebel groups declared war against it in January and February, this is likely to indurate its staying power in Syria. And there are signs that the group might eventually consolidate its presence in the east and make inroads into the north, especially as it seems to be following new strategies during its latest push.

The group has been focusing on negotiations, rather than only brute force, which in large part explains its striking successes of late. Although the Islamic State has attacked a few cities and towns in Deir ez-Zor and forcefully displaced its residents, it tends to do so only with towns that had bled it before, such as Khisham and Shuhail (the latter was long perceived as a stronghold of al-Qaeda affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra). In other villages and towns, the Islamic State has sent envoys to negotiate a deal in which local fighters surrender, pledge allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and implement sharia, and in exchange the Islamic State spares residents from any harm. The terms of these deals vary from one area to another. [Continue reading…]

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The ISIS demand for a caliphate is about power, not religion

William Dalrymple writes: On 3 March 1924, the Dolmabahçe Palace in Istanbul was surrounded by Republican Turkish troops. Inside, the last Ottoman caliph, Abdülmecid II, was reading the essays of Montaigne. Late that night, the prefect of police came to tell him that Ataturk’s new assembly in Ankara had just voted to abolish the caliphate and that he was to leave the country at dawn.

Photographs of the last caliph show an elderly, intellectual figure in a fez, kaftan and pince-nez, absorbed in the books of his library. Here he composed classical music and read the complete works of Victor Hugo, while cultivating his gardens and painting portraits of his family. But the following morning, he and his family were escorted into exile in Europe aboard the Orient Express, eventually settling in Nice. He was never allowed to return.

A few years later, the last caliph was spotted by the correspondent of Time magazine. “He may be seen strolling with a mien of great dignity along the beach near Nice,” the reporter wrote, “attired in swimming trunks only, carrying a large parasol.”

His daughter married into the family of the Nizam of Hyderabad, and whatever the dreams of the Islamic world, there has been little interest among Abdülmecid’s family to revive the office that Ataturk took from them.

In the absence of a descendant to fill the vacancy, the position of caliph was claimed by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi during midday prayers just over a week ago in Mosul. [Continue reading…]

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Deadlock blocks Iraqi leadership vote as ISIS makes gains toward Baghdad

The New York Times reports: As Iraq’s deadlocked Parliament was again unable to reach a deal to name a new speaker on Sunday, Sunni militants carried out a raid near Baghdad, a symbolically significant attack signaling their intent to move closer, even if only by a few miles, toward the Iraqi capital.

Although the pretext for the delay was a severe sandstorm that prevented northern Iraq’s Kurdish lawmakers from flying to Baghdad, the real reason appeared to be that last-minute deals between the largest Shiite bloc and the Sunnis were falling apart.

“We were ready, we came with our candidates, but the others haven’t presented their candidates,” said Usama al-Nujaifi, the Sunni lawmaker, who served as speaker in the last Parliament but has agreed not to run this time.

“The country is completely collapsing and we need to unify the nation — the delay means more killing, more displaced and more emigration,” Mr. Nujaifi said. [Continue reading…]

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Bodies found north of Baghdad as Sunni insurgents turn on each other

Reuters reports: Residents of a town north of Baghdad found 12 corpses with execution-style bullet wounds on Monday, after fighting between rival Sunni insurgent groups that could eventually unravel the coalition that seized much of the north and west of the country.

The incident points to an intensification of infighting between the Islamic State and other Sunni groups, such as supporters of former dictator Saddam Hussein, which rallied behind the al Qaeda offshoot last month because of shared hatred for the Shi’ite-led government in Baghdad.

Police in Muqdadiya, a town 80 km (50 miles) northeast of the capital, said residents from the nearby town of Saadiya found the 12 corpses on Monday after intense fighting overnight between Islamic State fighters and the Naqshbandi Army, a group led by Saddam allies. [Continue reading…]

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Diplomacy can still save Iraq

Vali Nasr writes: Contrary to what pessimists are saying, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria’s sudden sweep across northern Iraq does not have to end with the Middle East’s borders redrawn. That would be a calamity; the United States should do all it can to avoid it. And we can — if American diplomacy, rather than military intervention, is the main tool.

Yes, America may have to resort to surgical airstrikes to help Iraq check the advance of this extremist group, known as ISIS. But in the end, Iraq can be pulled back fully from the brink only if its quarreling sects agree to share power under a new constitution. And that will not happen unless American diplomats re-engage as mediators among the sectarian leaders.

The Shiite-Sunni divide has grown too wide for Iraqis to reconcile their differences by themselves, and Iraq’s neighboring powers are in no position to be honest brokers. Iran stands firmly behind Iraq’s Shiites, while Saudi Arabia and Turkey sympathize with its Sunnis.

So Americans alone have the ability to bring together all the stakeholders to end the fighting. Once we take on that role, the cooperation of the three regional powers would be not only useful, but essential. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. sees risks in assisting a compromised Iraqi force

The New York Times reports: A classified military assessment of Iraq’s security forces concludes that many units are so deeply infiltrated by either Sunni extremist informants or Shiite personnel backed by Iran that any Americans assigned to advise Baghdad’s forces could face risks to their safety, according to United States officials.

The report concludes that only about half of Iraq’s operational units are capable enough for American commandos to advise them if the White House decides to help roll back the advances made by Sunni militants in northern and western Iraq over the past month.

Adding to the administration’s dilemma is the assessment’s conclusion that Iraqi forces loyal to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki are now heavily dependent on Shiite militias — many of which were trained in Iran — as well as on advisers from Iran’s paramilitary Quds Force.

Shiite militias fought American troops after the United States invaded Iraq and might again present a danger to American advisers. But without an American-led effort to rebuild Iraq’s security forces, there may be no hope of reducing the Iraqi government’s dependence on those Iranian-backed militias, officials caution. [Continue reading…]

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Rival factions in Libyan capital battle for control of main airport

The New York Times reports: Rival militias in the Libyan capital, Tripoli, fought for control of the city’s main airport on Sunday, leaving at least six people dead and causing the cancellation of international flights, officials said.

The fighting, with rockets, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades, was some of the fiercest in the capital in months and an urgent reminder of the chaos prevailing in the country: Nearly three years after the death of Libya’s dictator, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the fighters who rebelled against him remained locked in a struggle for control of territory, resources and critical facilities, sidelining the central government.

The United Nations mission in Libya, which began to withdraw staff members last week because of security concerns, accelerated that withdrawal on Sunday, said a staff member who was not authorized to speak to the news media. A United Nations spokesman did not immediately return a call.

The deadliest of Libya’s recent fighting has occurred in the eastern city of Benghazi, where troops loyal to an army general named Khalifa Hifter are battling other armed militias, as part of what Mr. Hifter says is a national campaign to eradicate Libya’s powerful Islamist politicians and fighters. The clashes have opened new divisions across the country and aggravated Libya’s violence. [Continue reading…]

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Tom Engelhardt: The age of impunity

An exceptional decline for the exceptional country?
By Tom Engelhardt

For America’s national security state, this is the age of impunity.  Nothing it does — torture, kidnapping, assassination, illegal surveillance, you name it — will ever be brought to court.  For none of its beyond-the-boundaries acts will anyone be held accountable.  The only crimes that can now be committed in official Washington are by those foolish enough to believe that a government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from this earth.  I’m speaking of the various whistleblowers and leakers who have had an urge to let Americans know what deeds and misdeeds their government is committing in their name but without their knowledge.  They continue to pay a price in accountability for their acts that should, by comparison, stun us all.

As June ended, the New York Times front-paged an account of an act of corporate impunity that may, however, be unique in the post-9/11 era (though potentially a harbinger of things to come).  In 2007, as journalist James Risen tells it, Daniel Carroll, the top manager in Iraq for the rent-a-gun company Blackwater, one of the warrior corporations that accompanied the U.S. military to war in the twenty-first century, threatened Jean Richter, a government investigator sent to Baghdad to look into accounts of corporate wrongdoing.

Here, according to Risen, is Richter’s version of what happened when he, another government investigator, and Carroll met to discuss Blackwater’s potential misdeeds in that war zone:

“Mr. Carroll said ‘that he could kill me at that very moment and no one could or would do anything about it as we were in Iraq,’ Mr. Richter wrote in a memo to senior State Department officials in Washington. He noted that Mr. Carroll had formerly served with Navy SEAL Team 6, an elite unit. ‘Mr. Carroll’s statement was made in a low, even tone of voice, his head was slightly lowered; his eyes were fixed on mine,’ Mr. Richter stated in his memo. ‘I took Mr. Carroll’s threat seriously. We were in a combat zone where things can happen quite unexpectedly, especially when issues involve potentially negative impacts on a lucrative security contract.’”

When officials at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, the largest in the world, heard what had happened, they acted promptly.  They sided with the Blackwater manager, ordering Richter and the investigator who witnessed the scene out of the country (with their inquiry incomplete).  And though a death threat against an American official might, under other circumstances, have led a CIA team or a set of special ops guys to snatch the culprit off the streets of Baghdad, deposit him on a Navy ship for interrogation, and then leave him idling in Guantanamo or in jail in the United States awaiting trial, in this case no further action was taken.

Power Centers But No Power to Act

Think of the response of those embassy officials as a get-out-of-jail-free pass in honor of a new age.  For the various rent-a-gun companies, construction and supply outfits, and weapons makers that have been the beneficiaries of the wholesale privatization of American war since 9/11, impunity has become the new reality.  Pull back the lens further and the same might be said more generally about America’s corporate sector and its financial outfits.  There was, after all, no accountability for the economic meltdown of 2007-2008.  Not a single significant figure went to jail for bringing the American economy to its knees. (And many such figures made out like proverbial bandits in the government bailout and revival of their businesses that followed.)

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Edward Snowden condemns Britain’s emergency surveillance bill

The Guardian reports: The NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has condemned the new surveillance bill being pushed through the UK’s parliament this week, expressing concern about the speed at which it is being done, lack of public debate, fear-mongering and what he described as increased powers of intrusion.

In an exclusive interview with the Guardian in Moscow, Snowden said it was very unusual for a public body to pass an emergency law such as this in circumstances other than a time of total war. “I mean we don’t have bombs falling. We don’t have U-boats in the harbour.”

Suddenly it is a priority, he said, after the government had ignored it for an entire year. “It defies belief.”

He found the urgency with which the British government was moving extraordinary and said it mirrored a similar move in the US in 2007 when the Bush administration was forced to introduce legislation, the Protect America Act, citing the same concerns about terrorist threats and the NSA losing cooperation from telecom and internet companies. [Continue reading…]

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